In a business network comprising a plurality of computing nodes, a network administrator is required to maintain the health of the network to ensure that business application services and processes are running correctly. When failures occur, the network administrator must diagnose the cause and take any necessary remedial actions. In many cases, a failure may be detected on one node when in actual fact, the fault is with another node that has a business process relationship with the node on which the fault has been detected. To take the correct action, it is therefore necessary to detect the root cause of the fault.
Traditionally, the root cause can only be detected by determining the “direct” cause and effect relationship between two or more enterprise nodes. If a node fails that has a direct dependency on another, it follows that the dependent will fail if dependency on the non-failing node requires an input or output requirement subsequent to the failure.
The method of monitoring for and performing analysis to determine the root cause of a failure based on a “direct” cause and affect relationship is insufficient because in many cases there may be no direct relationship between the root cause node and the node on which the fault has been detected. Thus, the network administrator may end up taking inappropriate remedial actions on one node, without remedying the fault on the root cause node.